Participants of Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Participants of Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Buying centre analysis is a well established methodology practiced by sales personnel around the globe to convert prospect (target company) into customers. In this methodology, sales personnel analyse buyer organisation’s stake holders involved in the sale and classify them into influencer, decision maker, user and gate keeper. However post sale the analysis hibernates in some remote corner of the sales personnel’s laptop.

Customer satisfaction surveys are done by most organisation but several many of them are done in a shallow way. In several cases the survey is addressed to the decision maker and not to the influencer or the users or the gate keepers. Aim of this blog is to enumerate the benefits of involving users, influencer and gatekeepers in customer satisfaction surveys.

If a company has decided to pursue buying centre methodology as a sales strategy, then it has subscribed to the ideology that purchasing decision is made at many levels and is affected by many people. The company takes the responsibility to ensure favourable outcome of a sales pitch by taking positive steps to satisfy each stake holder of the sale; influencer, decision maker, user and gate keeper.

Sales organisations often get back to each one of these key personnel with an objective of upselling or cross selling or ensuring repeat purchase. However if a company doesn’t collect data on satisfaction of each of the key personnel then sales runs the risk of failing in its objective. Thus clearly the first benefit an organisation enjoys by involving all key personnel is that when they go back with a request, it most likely be granted!

Management guru Peter Drucker quoted, “Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two—and only two—basic functions: marketing and innovation. But why are we discussing innovation in a blog on customer satisfaction? Well the answer is: it helps in determining where to direct the resources and dollar! Great products have failed in market because they weren’t sold. Providing products that are perceived great not just by users or decision maker but by all key personnel collectively would be sold more easily, thus ensuring success. Thus when making the critical decision of where to put critical resources and dollar for innovation; see where the bottle neck is by seeing who is most disappointed!

Hoping the above has impressed you to include influencer, decision maker, and user if not the gate keeper… I would like to provide a framework that would help include the key stake holders in CSS.

If any of you want to learn more on this, feel free to contact me at badriravi@in.com

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Published by Badri Ravi

I am a Human Resource Consultant, a free thinker and a blogger who is focused on making organisations more transparent and people friendly where everyone feels a sense of achievement and oneness.
I generally write on Management, HR, Talent, Motivation, and Marketing since I believe these functions have the power of transforming today's organization to where they should be.
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